DShomshak

I heard about this on BBC World Service today. I hoped someone would post something with more information. The astronomer interviewed likewise drew attention to the unusual mass of the smaller object. She said that it was massive enough that it being a neutron star was iffy, but OTOH it's smaller than any other black hole astronomers have found; it's been thought that 5 solar masses was about the lower limit for black holes. But okay, maybe not. Or... it's something else, that nobody's observed before. (I've read speculations about quark stars.) Dean Shomshak

I heard about this on BBC World Service today. I hoped someone would post something with more information. The astronomer interviewed likewise drew attention to the unusual mass of the smaller object. She said that it was massive enough that it being a neutron star was iffy, but OTOH it's smaller than any other black hole astronomers have found; it's been thought that 5 solar masses was about the lower limit for black holes. But okay, maybe not. Or... it's something else, that nobody's observed before. (I've read speculations about quark stars.) Dean Shomshak

But it does bring up one of the ideas I had for how liberal and conservatives can disengage without a civil war: Sell the big cities to Canada. As electoral maps show, Dems dominate the cities while Republicans dominate everywhere else: Bubbles of blue in a sea of red. The US Constitution offers no way to dissolve the Union, but countries *can* sell territory back and forth. (leaving aside the Louisiana Purchase, there's still the Gadsden Purchase, or buying Alaska from Russia.) So for instance, if the US sold Pugetopolis to Canada to become part of British Columbia, LL and I could become fellow countrymen without having to abandon family, friends and my home. While the rest of Washington would become another deep red state to vote for Donald Trump. Repeat to transfer, say, the 20 largest or most liberal urban areas to Canada, and most of us get what we want. Liberals get single-payer health care; Trump's base gets an all-red America that can change the Constitution to make him king and declare Eveagelical Christianity the national religion. A lot fewer black, brown and LGBTQ people, too! It also means losing a big chunk of economic productivity, but well, that's a small price for righteousness. God will provide. I intend to suggest this idea to my senators and Congressional reps if Donald Truymp wins re-election. I dare say Trump himself might like the idea. It would be the greatest real estate deal in history, a really tremendous deal! Is it too soon for me to learn how to sing, "O Canada"? Dean Shomshak

Not entirely a good thing, considering the reported 23% of Trump voters who want to invade Canada to seize its natural resources... 🤮 But perhaps I am too uncharitable: "Everyone outside the tribe is ripe for plunder" is how most cultures, though most of history, seem to have seen the world. Is it fair to blame humans for being, well, merely human? Dean Shomshak

Double-post removed.

Good thoughts, LL. Darkseid's role isn't just, "Wow, he's tough" (and in an uneasy space between alien super-science and the supernatural), it's that he has a whole planet's resources, a massive army, and a cadre of super-powered minions. In this sense, Skarn and Tyrannon occupy a similar role -- though they are completely supernatural, without the Kirbyesque style. Whereas Doctor Destroyer and the Warlord have the raw power, the cadre and the army, but not the "From Beyond" vibe. Dean Shomshak

'Toddler on acid" is my preferred simile... And you assume anyone would have told Trump about the aliens. Or that the information would lodge in his brain, if he didn't see a way to profit from them, blame them for his problems, or use them to boost his chance of re-election. <eyeroll> Dean Shomshak

In the same spirit, Soc Lim: CW 'Shipping. The character cannot have a stable romantic relationship. Character or SO fgeel they must break up to protect the other. Frequent misunderstandings and lies. "Just wants to be friends" with the person who adores her; then when she starts to reciprocate feelingsm the other person has moved on and is seeing someone else. Romantic rivals. Keeping secrets, usually stupid ones. The interactions with Secret ID should be obvious. Dean Shomshak

Tricksta, I'll once again refer to Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson. They argue that political and economic systems based on extraction -- harvesting and concentrating wealth and power, instead of spreading out to to make more -- are innately chaotic and self-destructive in just the way you describe. Because the few with wealth and power always break into factions that try to screw each other and get more. The rewards are simply too great for whoever wins the game of thrones. It's why most people, through most of history, have suffered in poverty. Incidentally, Acemoglu and Robinson bluntly call out Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel as nonsense, for asking the wrong question to begin with. The question is not, "Why did a few societies advance their technology and become much wealthier than others?" It's "Why, despite abundant natural resources and millennia of hard work and human ingenuity, do societies stay poor and miserable?" They document the answer through history and around the world, from Neolithic villages to North Korea and Zimbabwe: Because most of the population is systematically robbed. A few societies have broken the vicious circle of exploitation, infighting over the spoils and decay and at least made an attempt at a broader districution of power and greater opportunities for more people to create wealth and keep it. The result is rapid increase in the society's total wealthy, and greater liberty. But the "virtuous cycle" can be broken and turned back into the tiresome old system of oligarchy and exploitation. It's how (to use one of their historical examples) Venice went from Queen of the Seas to a theme park for tourists. The early US managed to begin the contrary cycle... though not for everyone... and the more that wealth and political power have been distributed instead of concentrated, the richer and more powerful the country has become. But there is no guarantee this will continue, and powerful forces are working to return us to the good old days of peasants slaving for their lord and master. (Though I will grant the possibility that some of the people pushing for oligarchy don't consciously realize this is their goal.) Acemoglu and Robinson also discuss the importance of crisis point in shaping the direction societies go, but that's a faily big subject in itself. Suffice to say, we are living through at least three such crisis points at once. TL;DR: Some economists with serious academic cred agree with TrickstaPriest and have the research to back it up. Dean Shomshak

Atalanta (from Greek myth, look it up) Arrow (actually "Tirik," because he was Kurdish) Jitterbug Allegro Hirsch (German, "Stag/Hart/Deer")

As my eyesight gets worse, I've come to prefer audiobooks when I can get them. The Librivox website has scads of public-domain books read by volunteer readers. I just finished The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson, which I tried off-and-on to read for 30 years but never got past the first few chapters. The Night Land is a seminal work and a stunning feat of worldbuilding, but Gawd almighty the prose is bad: pseudo-archaic, prolix, with many lengthy digressions in which the narrator says what he thinks of something, why he's telling you what he thinks, and why he thinks it's important to tell you why he's telling you. The treatment of gender roles may also seem, hm, nauseating to progressive modern sensibilities. Some xhapters were a real strain even to listen through. But I'm glad that I have now "read" The Night Land. Dean Shomshak

We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when... Dean Shomshak

Bloody double-post.

White Wolf's supers game Aberrant included tech geniuses doing stuff like this as part of the background. Like, the hypercombustion engine (magnetohydrodynamics with a more "supoerish" name) and fuel cells greatly reduce petroleum use and make flying cars economical, though they are still very new. Better ways to clean toxic waste dumps, including plants genetically engineered to suck up toxic metals better than any natural plants. And yes, ultra-efficient solar cells. See "Technology of 2008" in Aberrant: Year One, written by... modesty prevents me. Dean Shomshak

Huh. Just yesterday, KUOW re-ran rapper Sir Mix-A-Lot's account of being stopped by police for driving a Lamborghini while black. You can probably Google it. Dean Shomshak

All Things Considered had a report on the fiasco of Georgia's vote-in-person primary this week. As one long-time observer of Georgia's elections noted, you really have to work to botch an election this badly: voting machines sent to wrong addresses, voting machines not working, untrained poll workers, grossly insufficient numbers of provisional ballots, etc. Election officials insist there were no problems in most of Georgia's precincts... It appears the problems were all in the black majority precincts. Funny, that. I'll take vote by mail, thank you. Though if a government is really determined not to let certain people vote, it'll find a way. Dean Shomshak

How do you make a mazel tov cocktail? Manischevitz and soda, maybe? Because of protesters are using Manischevitz against police, that's just monstrous. Dean Shomshak

Last time I checked, The Economist -- not exactly a flaming Leftie publication -- agreed with you. Since his nomination, they've warned that Trump, and Trumpism, pose systemic risk to political stability, economic prosperity, and common decency. Dean Shomshak

At least 25 people sought to be the Democratic nominee. (I losty count.) At least 20 of them got to make their pitch, however briefly, on televised debate stages. I thought several of them sounded better than Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders or any of the other "big names." Obviously, not many people agreed with me. So no, Biden is not "who we were given" as the anointed candidate of the Democratic Establishment. (At least not until the primariesbegan, and the party leaders realized that splitting the moderate vote 4 ways would hand the nomination to Sanders -- just like splitting the Not Utter Flaming Lunatic vote 10+ ways handed the Republican nomination to Trump.) Frankly, I wish the big donors and party bigwigs *had* decided early on a slate of 5-6 candidates who'd be backed, for voters to decide among. Preferably governors who had actual experience, you know, governing. But name recognition counts for a lot. And whatever his faults, (and they are many), Joe Biden was a name people knew. Or the tl;dr: Voters. Dean Shomshak

At risk of immodesty, I will once again recommend my article, "Megavillains!" in Digital Hero #3. You can read an excerpt here: http://web.archive.org/web/20051124024313/http://herogames.com/digitalHero/Samples/dh03megavillains.htm Dean Shomshak

Back in my old Seattle Sentinels campaign, every nowand then I wrote news updates of the super-world: what other heroes and villains were doing, "and superized" versions of current RL events such as the first Gulf War and the fall of the Soviet Union. I always included a few bits of "unexplained weirdness" ranging from the merely whimsical (such as the sun, as seen from Pretoria, South Africa, briefly turning into a glowing green "Mr. Yuck" symbol, or a rain of ice cream in Valparaiso, Chile) to the icky (a giant frog crashes through the window into a high school biology class and dissects the teacher) to the menacing (a small village in Japan disappears, leaving a big crater). Someof it was evidence of low-profile or newly-appeared supers (such as the armored car robbed by a pair of flying mastiffs and a small, acid-spitting dragon -- first appearance of the Great Beast [see creatures of the Night: Horror Enemies]), but a lot of it was the work of a tremendously powerful, completely insane reality-warping villain the PCs accidentally sent into humanity's collective unconscious. (That situation was eventually resolved.) Dean Shomshak

Yeah, I got the block saying I need to subscribe or turn off ad blocking... but the block took a few minutes to appear. Second time I opened it, I quickly copied the article and read it offline. For once, poverty-row slow dial-up connection for the win! Dean Shomshak

Meanwhile, a bit of satire. Can this former British colony pull itself out of its downward spiral of misgovernment, disease and intractable ethnic hatreds? How Western media would cover Minneapolis if it happened in ... www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/29/how... Dean Shomshak

Meanwhile, a bit of satire. Can this former British colony pull itself out of its downward spiral of misgovernment, disease and intractable ethnic hatreds? How Western media would cover Minneapolis if it happened in ... www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/29/how... Dean Shomshak

Yesterday on On the Media, Boston U law professor Debra Ramiriez [warning: I'm guessing at the spelling] discussed a proposal, apparently not new, that police officers should carry professional liability insurance. Doctors must do this; lawyers must do this; even hairdressers must do this; and of course everyone who drives needs accident liability insurance. Departments would cover a basic level of liability insurance, but if the insurance company sees signs that a cop is becoming a threat to the community and exposing the department to resulting lawsuits, well, the insurance goes up and the cop must pay the balance. Learning is expected to result. Police unions, of course, hate it and any other scheme that exposes cops to liability. Okay, so it's a union's job to look out for its members. But the public has a bit more stake in these negotiations than we would for, say, UAW versus Ford. Dean Shomshak